page_title: Pinturicchio
section_title: Work in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome
hierarchical_section_title: Pinturicchio / Biography / Work in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome
caption_attribution_description: English: St. Jerome (ca. 347-420), one of the four Latin Fathers of the Church (along with Sts. Augustine, Ambrose, and Gregory the Great), is particularly famous for translating the Bible into Latin, known as the Vulgate Bible. The saint spent four years in the Syrian desert as a hermit, mortifying his flesh and elevating his spirit through study. The subject has given Pinturicchio the opportunity to depict a monumental, rocky landscape, while the lizard and the scorpion call attention to the desolation of the scene. The open book contains a passage from a letter attributed to St. Augustine in which Jerome is compared to St. John the Baptist, another saint who lived in the wilderness.
context_page_description: Pintoricchio or Pinturicchio whose birth name was Bernardino di Betto, also known as Benetto di Biagio or Sordicchio, was an Italian painter during the Renaissance. Born in Perugia in 1454 and dying in Siena in 1513, Pintoricchio acquired his nickname, meaning, because of his small stature. He also used it to sign some of his 15th and 16th century artworks.
context_section_description: After assisting Perugino in his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel,  Pinturicchio was employed by various members of the Della Rovere family to decorate the Semi-Gods Ceiling of Palazzo dei Penitenzieri and also a series of chapels in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, where he appears to have worked from 1484, or earlier, to 1492. "Would be, if it had been left with all its original decorations, one of the finest monuments to Pintoricchio’s art in Italy. A great deal still remains, but much has been swept away", sums up his work in that basilica Evelyn March Phillipps.
  The earliest of his works is an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds, in the Della Rovere Chapel, the first chapel (from the west) on the south, built by Cardinal Domenico della Rovere. In the lunettes under the vault Pinturicchio painted small scenes from the life of St Jerome.The polychrome grotesque wall decoration on yellow-gold background were probably inspired by the paintings of the Domus Aurea, and belong the earliest and highest quality of their kind in Rome.
  The frescos which he painted in the Cybo Chapel, built by Cardinal Lorenzo Cybo de Mari in the beginning of the 16th century, were destroyed in 1682, when the chapel was rebuilt by Cardinal Alderano Cybo. The old fresco of the Virgin and the Child by Pinturicchio was detached from the wall and sent by the cardinal to Massa in 1687. The fragment was re-used as the altarpiece of the Ducal Chapel of the Cathedral of Massa.
  The third chapel on the south is that of Girolamo Basso della Rovere, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, and bishop of Recanati. The Basso Della Rovere Chapel contains a fine altarpiece of the Madonna enthroned between Four Saints, and on the east side a very nobly composed fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin. The vault and its lunettes are richly decorated with small pictures of the Life of the Virgin, surrounded by graceful arabesques; and the dado is covered with monochrome paintings of scenes from the lives of saints, illusionistic benches, and very graceful and powerfully drawn female figures in full length in which the influence of Luca Signorelli may be traced.
  In the Costa Chapel, Pinturicchio or one of his helpers painted the Four Latin Doctors in the lunettes of the vault. Most of these frescoes are considerably injured by moisture and have suffered little from restoration. The last paintings completed by Pinturicchio in this church are found on the vault behind the choir, where he painted decorative frescoes, with main lines arranged to suit their surroundings in a skilful way. In the centre is an octagonal panel of the Coronation of the Virgin, and surrounding it, are medallions of the Four Evangelists. The spaces between them are filled by reclining figures of the Four Sibyls. On each pendentive is a figure of one of the Four Doctors enthroned under a niched canopy. The bands which separate these pictures have elaborate arabesques on a gold ground, and the whole is painted with broad and effective touches, very telling when seen (as is necessarily the case) from a considerable distance below. No finer specimen of the decoration of a simple quadripartite vault can be seen anywhere.
caption: Saint Jerome in the Desert, c.1475-1480, oil on panel, 149.8 x 106 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
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